Tragedy and triumph

 

This was Bill Greenshield’s final speech as President to NUT Conference 2009. He was introduced as ‘the man who was challenged to bring down capitalism in his year of office - and look what happened!’

 

What sort of union do we want? One of the most important developments in the Union during my year as President has been our growing commitment to our organising agenda – a commitment to build our strength and organisation at local level, and to prioritise the involvement of all members at school, Association and Division levels directly in the work and leadership of the Union. Our collective membership is the source of our strength, not wishful thinking and top-down “behind closed doors” government cronyism.

 

Comrades!

The organisation of Young Teachers in the Union – both as young professionals and Union activists is a key feature of this. I was very pleased to speak at their conference, and to get such a positive response - but initially I found it difficult to know how to address them, and I have the same problem now in addressing you. ‘Colleagues’ seems to me to be an insufficient term. We don’t just work together – we are much more closely related. We are bound together, united in a great social movement for the advancement of teachers and our education service, united against powerful forces, united in a struggle of ideas and action for progress…. a struggle that has always been an integral and inseparable part of the demand of ordinary people for dignity, social progress and the democratisation of society - and it remains so today.

Elsewhere in our trade union movement, both at home - in individual sister unions and the TUC - and abroad in Education International, from Australia to Venezuela, from France to Cuba, from Canada to Greece – there is a common form of address, which I’ve used quite naturally while representing you as President. They call each other ‘comrades’. It’s a concept very familiar to me, but I looked it up and found a definition of comradeship. ‘A close fellowship of those bound together fighting for a common cause; a mutually dependent group of equals, working in solidarity.’ That seems just about right to me.

 

So… Comrades!

The year has been one of tragedy and triumph, one in which we can be proud to have led the profession, in which we have campaigned well and won battles – but a year in which, as we meet in conference again, the war remains to be won.

 

Steve Sinnott

Right at the beginning of the year we were struck a massive blow with the death of Steve Sinnott. This week particularly we remember Steve and our hearts are with his family. His death was a blow to all of us, regardless of where we feel ourselves to be on the wide spectrum of views in the Union. It was a huge blow to all of us not just because he was our General Secretary, but because Steve was the person he was, and because of his style of leadership. He set out to show due respect to all, to develop a modern union in which the talents of all are put to work, in which factional ambitions are seen for the infantile disorders that they really are, in which we can unite around a genuinely progressive and radical agenda based on members’ priorities, in which we can address each other genuinely as comrades. Steve embodied the organising agenda, so important to us now.

He made huge progress in his three short years as General Secretary, yet he had much more to do – and he knew it. He was optimistic, positive about the future, full of energy, and confident in the strength of the membership and the activist base of the Union – and in our international role too. We have marked his passing and celebrated his life, and we will remember him throughout this conference and into the future – recommitting ourselves to his message of unity and solidarity.

 

I personally was looking forward to working closely with Steve, and have missed him throughout my year. But in Christine we found an Acting General Secretary who, taking on the job in such unexpected, sudden, tragic and stressful circumstances, stepped up to the mark and led the Union into national action on a scale we had not taken on for two decades. We owe a great deal to Christine, and the way she has led the Union. She has done a great job, and maintained our unity. No personal or factional ambition should be allowed to disrupt that unity, which is the source of the strength we are going to need in the coming years. Our Union leadership needs to reflect ALL our members.

 

Our salaries action was entirely necessary, and we can be justly proud that in a time when others vacillated, we demonstrated clearly that teachers would not sit back and take year on year pay cuts – and I was certainly proud to be President of the union that stood up for ALL teachers. Our action was strong, and in it we built new, stronger alliances – with other public sector unions, with trades councils, with community organisations, with parents. But the issue remains to be tackled. There can be no sustained ‘world-class teaching profession’, no ‘21st Century public services’ without proper levels of pay and working conditions. This ambition will not be achieved by lip service and ‘aspirational statements’ by politicians. It will only be won by a sustained alliance of the workers in those services, and solid support from the communities that we collectively serve. I have been proud to have been President as the NUT took the lead in working for that united approach, even though it proved difficult to sustain, and I look forward to being part of it in the future as Martin takes over the Presidency.

 

Ending the child abuse of SATs

But our role goes far beyond fighting for teachers’ immediate interests as a group of workers. We are in a life and death struggle for the survival and future development of state comprehensive education, facing up full-square to those who seek to dismantle it, turn education into a commodity, and to privatise it. In attempting to undermine state education, every trick in the book is used to denigrate our profession and our schools. Children are still subject to oppressive testing in order to provide the raw data for league tables in order to create and sustain competition between schools – with all the negative curriculum and workload implications that go with it. A high point of my Presidential year was the joint conference between the Union and NAHT which has led to our working together to finally put an end to SATS. We WILL see an end to this child abuse.

 

So, there is a world wide struggle between distinct world views of education and other public services. We stand for a systematic approach to meeting the real needs of children – and particularly those from the toughest backgrounds, as Steve used to say. We see education as a liberating process, providing young people with the tools and the skills to take control of their own lives and society as a whole. Others see public services – as Education International has said – as ‘a dream market for future investment’ – a source of profit. There can be no compromise, no “third way” between these positions.

 

Again, as President I have been very proud to see our Union taking the lead on fighting privatisation, working closely on the ground with members and local officers of all our sister teaching unions, with other unions, and with the Anti-Academies Alliance. Speaking for the Union at our close ally UCU’s conference on ‘Commodification of Education’ was another memorable part of my Presidency.

 

We should all be very proud that this concerted work is winning the struggle of ideas. Increasingly we are able to defeat the proposals of the privatisers, expose the false arguments of ‘diversity and choice’ and lead schools and communities in defending our community schools as indeed we did in my ‘home patch’ in Derby, in total unity with the local NASUWT branch and trades council.

 

It is incredible to me that, despite the frailties and failures of the ‘free market’ system with its recurrent crises that are currently exposed for all to see, there are still very strident voices demanding that our schools be handed over to those very forces.

 

Suppose that there had been a Woolworth’s Pick & Mix Academy? Or an MFI Academy? By the way when I heard that MFI furniture had collapsed, I have to say that it was not entirely a surprise. I’d come across this phenomenon before.

 

But this is not a joke – the fight to prevent the neo-liberal ambition to privatise education is the key struggle for the first couple of decades of the 21st Century. Together, we are winning that struggle, but they will not just give up… we have to develop the fight still further, and I know that Martin as President will have this as top priority.

 

Of course there are many other areas of our work that the Union has taken on, that Conference will be reviewing and developing. I want to mention just one more, and that does not mean that I think the many others are unimportant.

 

We are facing what is usually referred to as a ‘global recession’. I think it is referred to that way to suggest that it is somehow a natural disaster, and not man-made. It is, of course, a capitalist crisis – entirely the product of the free market system and magnified and accelerated by the neo-liberal agenda which maintained that the market could solve everything. What is sure is that those who have got very rich from that system will not want to pay for the crisis, which, I believe is much deeper and more fundamental than we are being told.

 

We are going to be living and working in communities that are going to suffer as a result. There will be accelerating unemployment, housing repossessions and growing poverty. We know already that it is class division and disadvantage that fundamentally determines underachievement of working class children in our schools – and that disadvantage, that wealth-poverty gap, will grow. The fascist BNP will attempt, are attempting, to use this situation to build their support. We teachers, the NUT, have to be at the very heart of our communities. Every school must become a fortress, a rock in every community which stands up for ordinary people, which advocates community cohesion and solidarity, and which rejects the threat of racism and division which has only too often found fertile ground in economic crisis. So, I am very proud that it was in my Presidential year that we established the political fund expressly for the purposes of fighting the BNP… and we  will have to use it very soon. But no fund can do the work on the ground. Every Association and Division needs to take this work on as a matter of urgency.

 

Our strategy

Comrades, our great Union must have a vision of the future and positive policies for that future. We need furthermore a strategy, a developed game plan for how to achieve them – policies are of little use if they are not implemented. That strategy must have some targets too, if you’ll forgive the expression.

§ Maintain the internal unity of the Union

§ Step up the fight to establish a single education union – for divided we remain weaker than our cause can allow

§ Reassert teacher professionalism, and defend and take control our work, our schools and our state comprehensive education service

§ Build Union strength from the bottom up – every school a fortress

§ Put the Union at the heart of our communities and help stop all those who would promote division amongst our people

§ Promote a world based on education, peace and solidarity, not  ignorance, exploitation and war.

§ Join with all TUC unions in developing a new vision for society based on need not greed, on the common good, on public service not private profit.

 

Thank you for allowing me to be your President. It has VERY genuinely been a real honour.

 

Solidarity forever!